Alexandria’s Researcher is the library gateway.

With Researcher you can search the catalog of the Iowa Masonic Library by Author, Title, Series, Subject or Key Word

3 Rules to create more effective searches in Alexandria

#1—Use a period for an exact match.

When you search for a single word, Alexandria is performing a ‘begins with’ search. For example, if you search “rain”, you will get results for not just “rain” but also “rainbow” and “raincoat” and “rainmaker” and so on. If you are looking for a book titled “Rain” or a book about precipitation, you don’t want results for all those other terms. Thus, Rule #1 is this: When you want to search an exact term, put a period (.) at the end of the word.So using that earlier example, you would search for “rain.” with a period. Period.

#2—Multiple words is a Boolean AND.

When you search for more than one word or term, it’s the same as a Boolean AND search with exact match on all terms. So you don’t have to type anything like “cat AND dog” or “cat. && dog.”—just type “cat dog” to find everything that has something to do with both a cat and a dog.

#3—Use filters to narrow results.

Even if you’ve searched exactly the term you want to search, like “wizards”, you may still get too many results to easily scroll through. Alexandria lets youfilter by things like Author, Publication Year, and Medium,so you could easily see all the most recently-published items, or all the eBooks by J. K. Rowling.

Note: ClickFind Morebefore you apply a filter to include more search results in that filter.